The Unruly Force of Human Desire
A Review of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Lower than the Angels
Few forces have fractured the modern Church more profoundly than sex. Debates over same-sex marriage, gender identity, clerical celibacy, and purity culture have split denominations and reshaped global communions. The Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have all faced internal dissent, declining membership, or outright division over issues of sexuality and ordination. And yet, we live in a moment of striking paradox. On one hand, our culture is saturated with sexual imagery—from ubiquitous pornography and explicit media to Pride parades and an ever-growing list of sexual identities. On the other hand, young adults are reportedly having less sex than previous generations, express fatigue with sexual content in entertainment, and are marrying and having children at historically low rates. These contradictions echo within the Church itself. While exvangelical voices speak openly of repression and purity culture trauma (often advocating for the loosening of traditional Christian morals), it is former pornstars and OnlyFans creators who preach chastity, modesty, and biblical fidelity. It seems that sexuality today is both everywhere and elusive, desired and resisted, confessed and condemned. Into this conflicted cultural moment steps Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, a sweeping and unabashedly provocative account of how the Church has wrestled with the unruly force of human desire.
From the outset, MacCulloch anticipates that many readers will approach Lower than the Angels ready to “rage” for a wide variety of reasons. Conservative Christians, he suggests, will likely bristle at his rejection of any consistent, timeless Christian sexual ethic grounded in Scripture and tradition. Meanwhile, those shaped by trauma or cultural suspicion toward Christianity may be frustrated by his refusal to dismiss the Church’s past outright as nothing but repression. Yet for progressive Christians, there is much to celebrate and cite. In this sense, while Lower than the Angels is an impressive feat of scholarship, it is also unmistakably a polemic, with clear liberated heroes and repressed villains. MacCulloch aligns himself with scholars like Paula Fredriksen and Karen L. King in lamenting the historical consolidation of orthodoxy and the marginalization of alternative voices. Just as Fredriksen decries the triumph of catholic uniformity over early Christian diversity, and King challenges the boundaries of the New Testament canon, so too does MacCulloch grieve the Church’s narrowing of sexual ethics over time. MacCulloch’s sympathies clearly lie with those who challenged or transgressed the official sexual frameworks of their time. Given that MacCulloch opens with a quotation from John Boswell, a watershed figure in the study of Christianity and homosexuality, it’s an early and telling clue about the narrative’s trajectory and underlying sympathies.
It’s no surprise, then, that MacCulloch turns his attention to figures who stood at the edges of Christian orthodoxy, those whose lives and loves unsettled prevailing norms and exposed the fault lines of ecclesiastical authority. These include female mystics like Marguerite Porete, burned at the stake for her association with the Free Spirit heresy, and Margery Kempe, whose visionary chastity within marriage defied both clerical suspicion and gendered expectations. He elevates radical sects such as the Cathars, who condemned procreative sex as corrupting the soul, and the Beguines, whose celibate communities of laywomen defied both ecclesiastical and marital expectations. He also explores the complex role of eunuchs in Byzantine Christianity, figures seen simultaneously as genderless angels and scandalous ambiguities, many of whom rose to prominent ecclesiastical positions despite canonical prohibitions. MacCulloch lingers sympathetically over same-sex spiritual friendships, especially in monastic settings like those celebrated by Aelred of Rievaulx, where love between men blurred the lines between divine intimacy and personal affection. In each case, MacCulloch tends to cast those who resisted or reimagined sexual norms, not the upholders of doctrinal discipline, as his most compelling, often heroic, subjects.
But at times, MacCulloch’s broader claims are quietly undermined by the very evidence he presents. While he is eager to demonstrate that Christian sexual ethics have never been consistent or universally enforced (a point he repeats often), his narrative disproportionately favors figures on the theological and social margins. Mystics, heretics, eunuchs, and rebels take center stage, while the vast majority of ordinary Christians, who, however imperfectly, living within the bounds of heterosexual monogamous marriage, are largely passed over. Despite denominational differences, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox traditions have long upheld monogamous marriage between a man and a woman as the normative framework for Christian sexual ethics. Such a claim may lack the revisionist appeal that fuels popular interest, but it offers a more accurate synthesis of the historical record. It is clear that for every clerical celibate, erotic mystic, Byzantine eunuch, or Mormon polygamist, there were countless Christian men and women who married, raised families, and conformed to a prevailing Christian sexual norm. In short, MacCulloch’s story leans heavily toward the exception rather than the rule.
This sympathy for the unconventional does not mean that more conventional expressions are entirely overlooked. But when MacCulloch does turn to these figures, it is rarely to explore the theological or pastoral depth of Christian marriage. Instead, they often serve as further evidence of the Church’s intrusive and oppressive instincts. Even the most socially normative relationships are portrayed primarily as sites of institutional surveillance and moral regulation. The focus remains fixed on how sex (especially marital sex) was monitored, moralized, and politicized. For example, Augustine, tormented by his own youthful passions and dogged by Pelagian opponents like Julian of Aeclanum, shaped a theology in which sexual desire became one of the principal symptoms of original sin, part of what made humanity corrupted after the Fall. During the 11th-century Gregorian Reform, the Church’s regulation of sexuality broadened to target entire ways of life, with clerical marriage becoming a primary focus. Long tolerated, marriage was now framed as a spiritual liability, tying priests to worldly entanglements like inheritance and family loyalty. In MacCulloch’s telling, Gregory VII and his allies promoted celibacy not only as a mark of holiness but as a means of asserting ecclesiastical authority and reinforcing papal control.
Even the Protestant Reformers, who famously restored clerical marriage and affirmed sexual intimacy within the bounds of covenant, are not spared MacCulloch’s more cynical gaze. Figures like Martin Luther and Thomas Cranmer are portrayed as merely replacing one form of control with another. Substituting the celibate Roman Catholic priest with the bearded, married evangelical paterfamilias. Marriage, and the sexual intimacy it sanctioned, is framed not as a recovery of theological depth, pastoral balance, or even a celebration of intimacy, but as a new stage for moral performance and domestic discipline. Luther may have recommended marital sex twice a week as a remedy against temptation, but in MacCulloch’s telling, even that comes across less as a joyful affirmation of embodied love than a kind of Reformation-era behavioral management strategy. Ironically, in an age when celibacy was still regarded as the spiritual ideal, the Reformers’ endorsement of sex within marriage was radically disruptive, redefining holiness in domestic, physical, and even pleasurable terms. Yet sadly, MacCulloch seems largely uninterested in the genuinely transgressive theological move this represented, preferring instead to frame it as yet another iteration of institutional control. While MacCulloch is often remarkably empathetic and generous toward those on the margins, he is, at the center, frequently sarcastic and predictably cynical.
Yet ironically, the very ecclesiastical controls that MacCulloch so often critiques begin to appear, in his own account, less as arbitrary impositions and more as desperate attempts to manage a world teeming with sexual disorder. Modern Christians may imagine that the 21st century is uniquely overwhelmed by sexual sin but MacCulloch marshals a wealth of historical evidence to show that earlier eras were hardly paragons of chastity. Roman society accepted slave concubinage as routine, and even Christian households struggled to disentangle this norm from emerging teachings on monogamy. In medieval Europe, cities like Montpellier and Florence established publicly licensed brothels as “necessary evils” to contain male lust. Even more scandalous, in London, the Bishop of Winchester oversaw the infamous “Stews” of Southwark, essentially a red-light district under ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Clerical concubinage, meanwhile, remained widespread despite centuries of papal condemnation; in fact, some dioceses in Switzerland made a steady income from fines levied on priests for keeping unofficial wives. Penitentials from the early Irish Church catalogued everything from mutual masturbation among monks to bestiality and “femoral” sex. Far from being a modern invention, the ancient and medieval worlds were rife with sexual license and dysfunction, and Christian leaders (then as now) were often scrambling to catch up.
Some of the most compelling aspects of MacCulloch’s research reveal that the Church’s concern with sexual sin was not always rooted in cynical control, but often in sincere pastoral concern and a palpable sense of eschatological urgency. Unlike many theological debates confined to academic or elite circles, these issues were anything but abstract. They were daily and visceral struggles for parish priests and local pastors. Men charged with guiding disorderly flocks while battling their own temptations and striving to preserve moral credibility. Although MacCulloch frequently critiques the Church’s historic impulse to police sexuality, he also (perhaps unintentionally) acknowledges that these efforts were often animated by genuine pastoral anxiety and a sobering awareness of eternal consequence.
Interestingly, the disciplinary impulse he documents appears not merely as a product of institutional anxiety or theological rigidity, but as a response to recurring and deeply rooted realities that demanded some form of spiritual governance. For example, he recounts how some of the earliest monks and hermits resorted to extreme, and at times bizarre, methods to suppress sexual desire. In one notorious case, a monk is said to have placed a desert snake on his bare body in a desperate attempt to shock himself out of arousal. He also brings to light the obsessive specificity of penitential manuals, which catalogued sexual sins in almost forensic detail: a monk who touched his genitals while praying might be sentenced to weeks of fasting; fornication with a menstruating woman could incur seven years of penance; a priest guilty of sodomy might be permanently barred from celebrating the Mass; and even involuntary emissions during sleep were cause for spiritual concern. By tracing this long and fraught arc, MacCulloch demonstrates well that sexual temptation has never been a peripheral issue, but one of the most enduring and intractable pastoral challenges the Church has faced.
In the end, for all its problems of framing and its uneven favoritism toward the sexually transgressive, there is no denying the scholarly rigor and sheer breadth of Lower than the Angels. MacCulloch has produced a remarkably well-researched account, rich in detail and historical depth. As a map of how the Church has thought about sex in the past, the book is excellent, charting the twists and turns of a complex and contested tradition. But as a guide for orthodox Christians seeking direction today, it is far less reliable. Still, contemporary believers can take sober comfort in knowing that our struggles are not new. We stand within a long, unbroken tradition that has wrestled with the unruly reality of human desire and the enduring call to holiness.
Given the many examples amassed by MacCulloch, we may well confess that we are lower than the angels (Hebrews 2:7). Yet, it is worth remembering that (despite our sexual sins) we shall judge them (1 Corinthians 6:3).
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